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Matija Kopic. Credit: Mario Topić / Redux

This story appears in the August 20, 2012 issue of Forbes magazine.

Most software startup founders spend their time in front of a computer testing code. Matija Kopić spends his time in barns.

Kopić is a 25-year-old entrepreneur who grew up on a farm in Viljevo, Croatia, a village surrounded by fields of corn, wheat and soybeans, and plenty of goats. Growing up, Kopić had a knack for ­making cheese, but it wasn’t enough of a passion to overcome his desire to study computer science at the University of ­Zagreb. Now he’s going back to the land with his startup Farmeron.

Farmeron is a Web data service that farmers can use to aggregate the troves of information produced about their animals: diet, health, reproduction, milk production and medicine or drug dosage. Farmers have always had immense amounts of data but little training or tools to analyze it. “They’d get a printed report from a machine and another from a feeding machine. They get reports on health status, reproductive status, milking and veterinarian data, and then sit down to make sense of it,” Kopić says.

His intention was to connect the data coming from farm machinery directly to the Web. Some equipment was easy to work with, but most wasn’t, often forcing Kopić to customize how data were pulled or to skip some data entirely. Farm managers who tried it early on tended to quit using Farmeron because they didn’t see the benefit of incomplete data. Kopić decided instead to focus on a dead-simple way to let farmers upload their paperwork to the cloud. “What I learned is these guys really rely on spreadsheets,” Kopić says. “We gave up on fighting that.”

Kopić focused on making the analysis and the dashboards as fast and appealing to use as consumer sites such as Mint. Where it once took days for a dairy manager to input and analyze months of diet and medical data, now the conclusions are available instantly.

Vedran Bogdanović, a veterinarian and dairy farm manager of close to 400 cows in Kapelna, Croatia, says Farmeron helped him meet laws for animal tracking and sales and also for reporting animal deaths to insurance companies. Bogdanović also uses Farmeron to manage daily feed rations and feed purchases and make minor changes constantly, which is important since feed can represent up to 70% of his farm’s expenses. “We’re striving to save bits of money wherever we can,” Bogdanović says. “I was often able to see how a certain feeding component doesn’t fit into the plan, so I was able to react fast.”

For now, Farmeron is strictly a dairy and beef cow company, charging farmers with up to 75 cows about 25 cents per head monthly; those with up to 600 cows pay about 45 cents each month. Larger farms pay on a custom plan. Kopić plans to move into crop management by the end of the year and is interested in analyzing chickens and pigs. He’s even had a frog farmer request software.

Since Farmeron collects data across many farms, it can make broad conclusions about what works and provide ­recommendations on how to improve production. Kopić believes Farmeron can be particularly helpful in emerging markets where there isn’t as much knowledge about best practices. “That’s the most valuable asset in this kind of software,” Kopić says.

Once Kopić began studying computing in Zagreb he realized immediately how technology had a role to play helping farmers like his dad. Two weeks after graduating with his master’s degree in September 2010 he started the company in Osijek with cofounder Marko Dukmenić. Originally the product came in desktop and Web versions, but in April 2011 Kopić scrapped the desktop software so he could deploy faster in different countries.

In the summer of 2011 Kopić got into Seedcamp, the prestigious London tech incubator. Kopić used the six months in the U.K. to visit English farms and get their input on how to build the software. Some iPads were dropped in the wrong places. “They get filthy sometimes,” Kopić says. “That’s bad, but having all the relevant data in front of them and not having to run to a desk where a pile of papers or spreadsheets are stored is great.”

After Seedcamp Farmeron was accepted into 500 Startups, the Silicon Valley accelerator headed by Dave ­McClure, who has an interest in food startups. Farmeron launched in ­November 2011 and quickly signed some large European customers. More than 600 corporate farms now use the product, 45% of them in North America, with the largest having 4,000 ­animals. In May Farmeron inked a partnership with Neelsen Agrar, a large German equipment outfit with operations in more than 30 countries, which is selling Farmeron to its clients.

After raising $1.4 million in seed funding from NextView Ventures, ­SoftTech VC, Seedcamp, 500 Startups, Accelerator Group and Naval Ravikant, Farmeron is now establishing a U.S. headquarters and going after the U.S. market. It has a tech team of ten in Osijek and a sales team of two in the U.S., with plans to hire two more this fall.

Competitors include small firms such as Farmlogs, a Web startup that focuses on crop data, and software maker Farm Works, as well as John Deere, which has software and Web support for managing crop production and machinery. It will be a race to grab market share quickly. “Data is important to high-production agriculture, whether it be in livestock or crops,” says Deere spokesman Ken Golden. Until then Kopić is still meeting with farmers.